This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

If you've done Scotiabank Nuit Blanche as many times as I have — nine and counting — a strange but justifiable emptiness starts to take hold. Like the reckless one-night stand that it is, you start to wonder of the heat if the moment doesn't inevitably lead to a naggingly hollow feeling: That was great. I had fun. Um, call me?

Last year, Nuit Blanche decided to stick around for breakfast, at least, leaving a small handful of its all-nighters up for a longer look. This year, it extends the extension to a solid 10, lingering through the Thanksgiving weekend for a good, long look in the cold light of day.

As an idea, this is good. For years, one of the core complaints about the event was that its nominal function, as a fireworks display/civic branding campaign, sucked up a significant portion of the city's scant cultural resources, vanished in a flash and left nothing behind. The last part of that is what the event's braintrust are looking to remedy, and they do it this year with mixed results.

On a rainy Monday morning, I set out to peruse the leftovers across the event's three zones. Fort York was first on my list, and the deflating emptiness that historical wedge always seems to display aside — does anyone ever go there, if it's not for a concert or beer festival? — Nuit Blanche's persistent offerings left much to be desired.

Initially, I was struck by Wilfredo Prieto's Ascendant Line, a crimson flag descending its pole and unfurled as a giant red carpet running the full breadth of the site. Elegant and colourful, it did what a public installation should: Make the expected seem strange and unfamiliar, and ask more questions than it answers. I got it, but did it matter? Fort York does scant traffic during the week, which made me wonder why, if anywhere, a project should be extended so removed from the city it's meant to be serving.

I could say the same for Melting Point, the other Fort York piece by LeuWebb that scattered coloured light bulbs throughout the grass, as though the discharge of the site's historic cannons, but even that's too kind. Never mind the facile intent — the cannons are, apparently, firing off “good vibes” — the presence of the piece is lost in the daylight, when Fort York is open, making me wonder why it wasn't just packed up at dawn.

Presence is a big thing in a city going a thousand directions at once, and the question for the extended projects, really, is no longer what's going to find a strength of voice in a night of spectacle than what's going to give pause in the hurried churn of the workday.

Tall order, but one worth thinking long and hard about; in the days leading up to Nuit Blanche, I was on a panel with two people who had done just that: Gwen MacGregor, an artist who had written a master's thesis on Nuit Blanche, and Janine Marchessault, a decorated academic and curator who had co-curated one of the event's most memorable zones in 2012, “The Museum for the End of the World.”

When a Trudeau Foundation scholar (Marchessault) uses the word “sh--show” in her opening remarks about the event, you have to think something's wrong, and that's what we were there to talk about. One of the ideas that emerged was one of — wait for it — permanence: A commissioning aspect of the event that leaves permanent pieces of public art each year, creating a legacy that shrugs off the frat party aspects of the night and couches it in one of art. Yoan Capote, the Cuban artist who created the extended project Open Mind, a labyrinth based on a drawing of the human brain at Canoe Landing Park, has offered as much.

Walking around on Monday morning, I started thinking this was the model the extended projects would do well to pursue: Real things that have presence in places where people cluster and move in their daily lives. I found one on Spadina Ave., Maria Ezcurra's Made in China, a tall, lean scaffold bridging an alleyway between two buildings in Chinatown. On it, hundreds of pieces of clothing donated to the artist by the local community, standing in not only for the various ghosts of an immigrant population now rooted here, but for the very real economic exchange between Canada and their former homeland.

Those implications aside, it worked: It loomed, had presence — in size, in material, in the odd tension between the familiar made alien, strange. People stopped, looked up, took pictures. They wondered about it, internally and aloud. A small crowd gathered and conversation ensued. Museums themselves should be so lucky.

Last year had a handful of such lingerers that didn't need darkness and crowds to hold their own. Tadashi Kawamata's Garden Tower, a dense mound of chairs, could still be there, a year later, and still work its apocalyptic magic; Ai Weiwei's massiveForever Bicycles installation at Nathan Philips Square is, to my mind, a gargantuan missed opportunity for the city, where a game changing artist lent his considerable cred to an event still trying to establish its own. (For the record, Nuit Blanche organizers tried desperately to find a local home for the piece, but couldn't).

With those as the models, it's hard to grasp some of the things that stuck around this year. Glenda Leon's Silent Rise, an aluminum ladder-like structure had less presence on busy Queen St. W. than the sign representing it. Chelanie Beaudin-Quintin's Screaming Booth, a favourite on Spadina Ave. during the event, seemed a little lost in its corner of Nathan Philips Square. (Following up on Ai's piece of last year, the phone booth-sized installation could be forgiven some feelings of inadequacy.)

Presence isn't just about being big. Global Rainbow, the event's signature, uh, thing, is huge, spanning much of the night-time skyline, but it's exactly the kind of empty fireworks display that are among the event's worst mis-steps. Big Top Grand Stand, in the park at Clarence Square, at Spadina and Wellington, towers four storeys high, but it's just a big, shiny thing — a stack of colourful trailers garlanded with bunting that's slickly inoffensive and not much more. In Union Station, 8th Wonder reaches a little further, seeking to catch hold of 1950s movie monster/freak show hucksterism, and it does, revealing nothing of its multi-tentacled alien cyclops until you step inside. But its interactive eyeball notwithstanding, it's kind of a one-liner.

Which brings me back to Made in China, the most humble of all the projects, and the most elegant, provocative and meaningful, leaving you wanting to know more. That's presence. It's not enough to just stick around for breakfast. It's to have something to talk about.

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com